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February 25, 2016

Umberto Eco, Italy’s best-known literary export, was in a bad way when I met him in 1986 at Bologna University, where he was Professor of Semiotics (that abstruse branch of literary theory). “I’ve become a dissociated and schizophrenic personality”, he told me, crumpling up a cigarette packet. “The movie of The Name of the Rose has upset my psychic balance!” Shuffling grumpily round his office, he lifted up and slammed down books. Eco’s 1980 medieval whodunit had just been made into a film by the French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, starring Sean Connery as the monk-detective William of Baskerville. An artful reworking of Conan Doyle (with Sherlock Holmes transplanted to fourteenth-century Italy), the novel had sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. However, Eco refused to speak to journalists about the film.

February 24, 2016

Talking to a roomful of humanists about the superiority of science over religion is an activity apt to bring the words “preaching” and “converted” to mind – although preaching, of course, doesn’t really come into it.

The occasion was this year's Darwin Day Lecture – established by the British Humanist Association in 2003, after which it has been given, traditionally, on the Saturday nearest to Darwin’s birthday – the 2016 event fell squarely on the date itself, February 12. This year’s speaker was Professor Jerry Coyne, who has made significant contributions to our understanding of speciation, and whose review of Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything appears in the current issue of the TLS. (His own book, Faith vs. Fact, was reviewed in the TLS of January 22, 2016.) The “room” in question was Logan Hall, a lecture theatre at the Institute of Education which holds almost 1,000 people, and the event had been sold out for weeks in advance.

February 23, 2016

David Foster Wallace's extraordinary 1000-page novel Infinite Jest is twenty years old this month. It was regarded as a classic almost on arrival, and the years have deepened and affirmed that status. It is significant that the TLS has returned to the novel on numerous occasions over the intervening period: as Thomas Meaney wrote, in 2013, "To be the distiller of the times for a generation is no small feat".

Bharat Tandon reviewed Infinite Jest when it was first published, in 1996. Despite the novel's density and complexity (the last 100 or so pages are end-notes which are sometimes highly illuminating, occasionally playfully unhelpful – "no clue" – and, on one occasion, completely blank), and its rambling, multi-styled sentences and paragraphs, Tandon identified most of the crucial features, including the link between a conspiracy theory culture and the reader's own acts of interpretation; the addictive nature of a book about addiction; and the debt to Thomas Pynchon. Tandon described Infinite Jest as "allegorical sci-fi, recasting and stylizing contemporary anxieties as the genre has always done", but concluded that it "never seems more than the sum of its weighty parts".

What would a country run by Boris Johnson be like? Hilarious? No doubt. What japes there will be when this Shakespeare biographer is running the show. I wonder if he'll also be doing more of this, too: turning London into a giant office and effectively overruling a Grade I listing in the process . . . .

February 22, 2016

Antonella da Messina's "Portrait of a Man" (1475), which graces the cover of Georges Perec's Portrait of a Man – Louvre/Peter Willi/Bridgeman Image

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

The community of literary translators had its own Oscars (or Baftas) last week. The Society of Authors brought together the winners and runners-up in several translation categories for an evening hosted (as it has been for the past three years) by Europe House in Central London. Annual prizes go for French translation (sponsored by the Institut Français), German (the Goethe-Institut) and Spanish (the Instituto Cervantes). Prizewinning translators from Arabic, meanwhile, have the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature to thank as well as the Ghobash family. The quartet were joined this year by translators from the Swedish (the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation) and Dutch (the Dutch Foundation for Literature). The Italian John Florio Prize returns next year. In past years there have also been prizes for translation from Greek, Hebrew and Portuguese.

Installation by Onejoon Che; photo by Benoit Pailley, courtesy of New Museum, New York

By ANNA ASLANYAN

Senegalese, Ethiopian and Zimbabwean monuments, all similarly phallic and Soviet-looking, despite the surrounding palm trees; statues of African gentlemen, embodying the socialist-realist idea of a generic nineteenth-century liberal; a drawing captioned "Vladimiro M. [Mayakovsky] has landed in Havana and is talking to the black guy who is selling the red fish". These are among the images offered by Red Africa, a series of talks and screenings run by the foundation Calvert 22. Its aim is to explore the links between Africa, the USSR and "related countries".

At the centre of the series is an exhibition whose working title, Black Students in Red Russia (borrowed from a BBC Radio 4 feature) has been changed to Things Fall Apart (borrowed from Chinua Achebe, who in his turn borrowed it from W. B. Yeats). In a recent talk at the gallery, the curator Mark Nash and some of the participants touched on the programme's references to the African independence movements, the short-lived socialist "utopia" that followed them, and "the Cold War that wasn't cold". ​

February 18, 2016

Manuscripts of sixteen early poems by Sylvia Plath will be auctioned at Bonhams on March 16, along with photographs of her, and a birthday-card-letter to her mother from 1953, in which a rapturous Plath describes meeting W. H. Auden. Some of the material was first seen on the market when sold by the Plath estate in New York in 1982; more is anticipated, as a large collection is broken up.

February 17, 2016

Although the occasion is unlikely to be much remarked, 2016 will see the 200th anniversary of the birth of Punch's third Editor, Shirley Brooks.

Resourceful and witty, he wrote for many papers, reported from Russia, Syria and Egypt, and took Dickens’s former place as parliamentary correspondent of the Morning Chronicle. He also wrote plays which were staged in the West End with moderate success. His column in the Illustrated London News was engagingly entitled “Nothing in the Papers”, and he had a novel illustrated by Tenniel. On February 24, Catherine Southon Auctioneers will sell a stray volume of his diary (estimate £600–800), which includes an elegy for a young sweetheart whom he had never quite had the courage to kiss.

February 15, 2016

A new playwright is staging his debut work, the grandly titled The End of Longing, in the West End. The writer also stars in the play and dominates the publicity poster, which is plastered across the London Underground. The level of attention is justified, however – at least on a commercial level. For this new writer is none other than Chandler Bing. Matthew Perry’s play, which is running at the Playhouse Theatre by Embankment, tells the story of four Americans struggling to find conventional stability and contentment as they approach middle age – one is an alcoholic (played by Perry, who has himself been treated for addiction); one is a high-end prostitute; one is a neurotic; and one doesn't really have a thing, apart from apparently being “stupid” (which leads to some very shallow characterization, but quite a funny opening line). His name is Joseph: we are left to wonder whether his surname is Tribbiani.

February 13, 2016

The cover of a book I recently sent out for a TLS review. Will the two circumflexes in the titles one day become a thing of the past?

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Ah, the circumflex! The French one that is, as opposed to the Portuguese (apologies for returning to orthographical matters so soon). And I realize that I’m a bit of a johnny-come-lately on this, having spent a week reflecting deeply on the changes to French spelling announced by the Conseil supérieur de la langue française (a government-regulated body). Some 2,400 words will be affected, and both the "i" and the "u" will drop their circumflexes. As has been widely reported, “ognon” will now rub up alongside “oignon”, and “nénufar” will do the same to “nénuphar”. (The changes will be optional, so both versions will be correct, but I can’t help feeling that “ognon” looks ugly without its “i”, and that the “ph” is preferable too.) “Maîtresse” is allowed to drop its circumflex, as is “coût” (the circumflex generally denotes a suppressed “s”, as in “maistre” or “fenestre”). Some changes are less conspicuous: who's going to object to the French removing the eccentric hyphen from “week-end”? Or to “porte-monnaie” and “porte-feuille” becoming “portemonnaie” and “portefeuille”?